The Collector
by Lex Munro
Summary: Part of my Fateverse. The Auditor picks up Eight-ball to deliver it to the Collector, who holds it for its next Keeper.  Billy/Teddy background pairing. Warnings: AU, rule 63, brief language, sci-fi.
1. Call for Pickup

one of the new Auditor's first jobs.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. technobabble. rampant bad 616 references. reference to AU character death. hints of het (sort of) and slash. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s***).

**pairing:** implied Will/Dory (Billy/Teddy) and implied Nate/Wade.

**timeline:** Network Operations 3651 (AD 6188), a week after Auditor!Wade's death in **The Auditor** (**Blood & Tears**); WM local year AD 2065, immediately after the crash in **Scream Until We're Satisfied** (**End of Dreaming**); CT local year AD 4081.

**disclaimer:** characters belong to marvel. au and au versions belong to me.

**notes:** 1) GCP = Gravitic Constructor Pad. see the entry in **the Fateverse Glossary**. 2) the M11A1 (MAC-11 Advancement 1) is an American sub-compact machine pistol that fires .380s at a maximum rate of about 1200 rounds per minute. 3) Glock here refers to the beloved Glock 17, the Austrian-made workhorse of 9mm semi-automatic pistols. manufactured to ridiculously exacting standards of safety and reliability, it's used by the bulk of US law enforcement. 4) a macro is a short command (or button press) that is programmed to execute a long string of commands, as any PC power-gamer knows. 5) UMP stands for Universal Machine Pistol, an H&K submachine gun that can be chambered to fire .45 (UMP45), .40 (UMP40), or 9x19mm Parabellum (UMP9) rounds. it provides more stopping power and is more reliable than most SMGs. 6) Mr. Binky is the name of Sandi's cat in the Waking Man universe (and probably a few other worlds in the Fateverse). 7) one of the original Auditor's major jobs was exploration of bundles deemed to dangerous to risk the Cartographer, so the AR bundle maintains a large secondary database that includes anecdotal information the Auditor thought would be helpful. 8) Hope and Kali appear on Earth-339 sometime in the year 2065, at the end of the Skywar, at the wreckage of Helicarrier Providence (and Valse Faction Flagship Madeen). 9) meet the Collector, the most neurotic William Kaplan/Maximoff/Whatever in the multiverse. now meet his blonde bombshell wife, Theodora, who could be his blond bombshell husband Theodore if either of them really cared one way or the other.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Call for Pickup<strong>

When Hope inherited Kali, she inherited Wade's GCP. This is slightly awkward, because the thing's routed to Wade's vault, and nobody knows exactly what's in it. Even now, after fiddling with the GCP for a week, there's about forty items on the list she hasn't gotten to. Wade used a _lot_ of macro combinations, and the inventory doesn't use sensible names like 'M11A1 extended clip,' or 'recoilless launcher, heat-seeking.' Instead, Hope keeps seeing things like 'Boomstick' (which turned out to be a fully-auto drum-fed twelve-gauge) and 'Spock' (a silenced Glock).

The real speed bump in using the GCP is that the primary buttons are linked to Wade's favorite guns, four of which have custom grips meant for someone with much bigger hands than Hope's and most of which she can't shoot for shit.

She doesn't have the heart to reprogram it.

So she makes the extra effort to find the macros for the guns she _can_ shoot. Right now she knows two: Zoe is a neat little double barrel sawed-off, and Baxter is one of the UMPs.

Not everything in Wade's vault is a gun; in fact, three of the things Hope's gotten to aren't even weapons. There's a huge roll of duct tape under the inventory name 'The Force' (she even suspected what it was before she hit the send button). The other two are a can of Meow Mix (Noms for Mr. Binky) and a box of Kleenex (In Case of Emergency).

She's scrolling through the list (she thinks 'DON'T PANIC' is probably a towel) when Kali beeps on her desk.

_~New assignment.~_

"Lay it on me," Hope says.

_~Reloc 99735: Node 250 Eight-ball solid-phase presence from WM bundle to CT bundle. Priority Alpha.~_

"CT bundle?"

The text entry from the secondary database starts to scroll through Kali.

Junk Heap. Don't touch anything. Hot blonde shapeshifter can and will rip limbs off.

Hope arches an eyebrow. "Oh…_kay_. Thanks bunches, Wade. Kali, get me the official entry from the CDB, please."

Primary 106-283 (CT). Collector's Grotto (colloq. 'Junk Heap'). Exists slightly above PO. Site of Solid Phase Object Repository. Warning: high incidence of Fidelis Effect.

"What the hell is the Fidelis Effect?"

_~Clarification: the phrase 'Fidelis Effect' refers to a complex phase-resonance phenomenon whereby people, places, objects, or animals may spontaneously share traits.~_

Hope rolls her eyes. "Such as?"

_~Clarification: these traits include knowledge, appearance, X-gene mutations, and location.~_

"You and Wade are about equally helpful right now," Hope mutters. She feels a brief flash of childish self-pity, but shakes herself and stands up. "Priority Alpha, you said. So let's go, Kali."

_~Warning: lateral transit destination is rated for presence of radiation, toxic aerial particulates, and potentially hostile natives.~_

Joy.

Hope sighs, picks up the Node, nods. "Acknowledged. Put up a gravimetric filter."

The tunnel forms with a flash like light through water. Hope's skin tingles when it moves to engulf her, which is ten times better than the nauseating whiplash feeling of timesliding.

Kali's warning is well-deserved. They appear in a ruined world, an ash-clouded sky over blackened ground. About a hundred feet away is the combined smoking wreckage of two huge airships (looks like one rammed the other and they both went down), and the space between is littered with debris.

Even through the filter, Hope can smell burning metal.

The sunlight in this dead world is orange and muffled by cloud cover, so it takes her a while to spot the familiar glint of a Node.

It's beautiful, this Node—baseball-sized and perfectly transparent.

"Are you Eight-ball?" she asks.

A golden light twinkles and streaks over the Node's surface. _~Yes.~_ It sounds so much like the Savant that Hope shivers involuntarily. _~It's time to go. I need your physical contact to shut down for solid-phase transit.~_

She crouches, picks it up. The light vanishes with the suddenness of a snuffed candle. Eight-ball is curiously heavy, compared to other Nodes. "Okay, Kali, tunnel us to the Collector's Grotto. Whatever the hell that is."

Again, the flash and tingle of the gravitic conduit.

The Collector's Grotto, as it turns out, is a large cavern with shelves carved into the stone walls and a huge skylight above. The floor is covered with tables of all shapes and sizes, and the tables (like the shelves in the wall) are stuffed with _stuff_. Long strands of jars and cages and containers trail from the ceiling like willow branches, or octopus eggs. A hundred thousand kinds of thing, arrayed in itemized clusters, a spectrum of glorious _junk_. She spots the shape of a model Death Star on one table (there's an X-Wing near it, and a Millennium Falcon), a plush Mudkip on another. In one of the cages, a ferret peers out at her with sharp eyes.

Hope's gaze catches on a reef of snowglobes on an ornate golden table, hundreds of tiny worlds buried under snow and glitter. Mesmerized, she reaches to touch one, and a nervous voice calls out.

"Don't—don't, don't, _don't_ t-touch that!" he scolds. The nervous voice turns out to belong to a nervous-looking iteration of Will. He peers at her around a dangling tendril of colored glass bottles. "That, it, everything's got—got a proper _place_, and, and if you _move_ it—I—I've got this system, see—it's all arranged by resonance, so if you _move_ it, the whole Fidelis Effect is thrown outta whack and things'll start popping up where they don't go, and then the next time someone comes to get something, it'll take ages to find it, so that—that has to be exactly where it is, or else it won't be, and then nothing will, and it'll take me, like, _years_ to, to—"

Hope pulls her hand back quickly. "It's William, isn't it?"

He nods several times. "William, Will, William," he answers, half-shrugging.

Kali beeps. _~Ident confirmed.~_ White text dubs the man William Maximoff CT203, the Collector.

He seems to actually look at her for the first time, and is surprised. "You're the new Auditor? I thought you'd be…"

"A guy?" Hope guesses.

"Sorry. Yes. It's a rough gig, and—n-n-not that I think girls—sorry, _women_—can't handle dangerous work, I mean some of the meanest people I know are women—that came out bad—uh—"

"Calm down, Will," Hope says. "Because of quantum branch interference and stuff like that, I have to leave something with you for a while."

"Oh—oh, thank God!" Will cries, hurrying through the assorted imbroglio. "There's, there, it's—I've got this _space_, just a _space_, but nothing _went_ there, and I hate having these, these glaring—these _blanks_—it's like—nevermind, nevermind. Is it a Node? It _is_ a Node, isn't it? It's an actual physical-presence Node, it's—this table is for things that are, are more _real_ than other things—which probably makes absolutely no sense to you, but—"

"Actually, I know all about phase solidification, Collector," she interrupts mildly. She holds out the inert Node. "This is Node 250 Eight-ball."

Will takes Eight-ball with gentle hands and holds it up to the light until its control grid appears. He nods and continues through the cavern to the very middle, where the sunlight is brightest. There, dazzling sunbeams warm an array of charms, jewelry, and trinkets. In the middle of the table are several glassine shapes that Hope recognizes as Nodes, some with the blinking lights of pending timeslides. There is a conspicuous space at the very center, and it's into that space that the Collector carefully sets Eight-ball.

"I hereby verify the change in custody of this Node," he says in a clear, official-sounding tone. "It will remain in the repository until such time as it recognizes its intended recipient."

_~Receipt logged with Network Core,~_ says Kali.

"Can I get you anything to drink?" a woman asks, startling Hope.

"You must be the blonde shapeshifter who can and will rip limbs off," Hope supposes when she turns.

The woman blushes prettily. "Oh, so you heard about that…I'm sorry, but your predecessor was being _awfully_ improper at the time. I'm Dory, by the way—Will's wife."

"I'm Hope, the last Auditor's daughter. Or step-daughter. Or…well, I guess 'adopted' is a better term."

Dory smiles. "I know. Hopes crop up all over the place. They don't actually _have_ legitimate biological parents, so the terminology can get a little fuzzy. We're very sorry for your loss, by the way—and please give your father our condolences. I just finished a batch of iced tea, if you'd like some before you leave."

"Tea would be great."

**.End.**


	2. Bequeath

a version of Willemina Wilson becomes a Keeper.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. technobabble. rampant bad 616 references. hints of het (sort of). language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s*** and f***).

**pairing:** background Will/Dory (Billy/Teddy).

**timeline:** Network Operations 3652 (AD 6188); local year AD 4105.

**disclaimer:** characters belong to marvel. au and au versions belong to me.

**notes:** 1) "to bequeath" is "to leave to, as inheritance." 2) Mina's LYBs talk back a lot. 3) the shampoo fairies are a reference to **The Itsy-Bitsy Only Competent Person Present** (**Dreams of the Waking Man**). 4) marrying the world's most eligible bachelor and leading the Avengers is exactly what the first Auditor did. 5) kipple is something Philip K. Dick talks about in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" in simplest terms, kipple is the useless junk that humans accumulate and can never seem to be rid of (old receipts, junk mail, empty matchbooks); it reproduces when unobserved (such as when we go to sleep at night). Dick was really amazing in his little commentaries about the trappings of materialistic society. 6) Glock, as usual, is the Glock 17. Austrian semi-auto pistol, the workhorse of the 9mm world. 7) konpeito are "candy stars." they're little knobby round sugar candies usually around a centimeter in diameter. in Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away), konpeito is what they fed the soot gremlins that stoked the bathhouse furnace. jumbo konpeito are gumball-sized (around three centimeters in diameter). 8) Lotto is one of the American lottery games. [if you don't know what a lottery game is, basically, you spend anywhere from one to ten bucks on a ticket with a number combination, and if that's the number that comes up, you take the ticket in to redeem your winnings. the jackpots get up to millions of dollars (paid in small amounts over time). it's the ultimate in futile gambling.] 9) "cool beans" was Trixie's tagline in the English dub of Speed Racer. 10) yes, the last line is a reference to ItsJustSomeRandomGuy's Marvel vs. DC videos on Youtube.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Bequeath<strong>

Willemina Wilson has seen some weird shit. Like, with capital letters—Weird Shit.

Going twinkly-poof in a Trekkish flash of light in mid-conversation is pretty _fucking_ weird.

Behind her is a sheer drop. Before her is a big set of stone doors, straight out of Lord of the frigging Rings.

_Hi, welcome to Helm's Deep._

A funky laser-beam scans her.

_And now some Tron? Really? For fuck's sake._

Shut up.

You_ shut up. Bitch._

_~"Go away, I'm busy and we're not expecting any visitors,"~_ a man frets distractedly over some hidden speaker.

_~"Yes we are, dear, remember?"~_ replies a woman's voice. _~"The DBA told us last week."~_

_~"We are? She did? What f—why w—okay, okay, get the door."~_

Mina arches an eyebrow when some epic mechanical sounds start up on the other side of the doors.

In the darkened hallway beyond, a blonde woman has her hand on a lever. She's very pretty. Mina immediately hates her for this.

"Hi!" the woman says with a perfect smile. "I'm Dory, as in Theodora, but I couldn't stand Dora because of that creepy cartoon with the talking backpack."

Okay, she's got a point there.

"Howdy, Barbie," Mina says with a jaunty wave. "I'm Mina, as in Willemina, but if you call me Willie like the whiny bitch in Indiana Jones, I'll fucking shoot you."

Dory—

_Dorkiest name ever._

—smiles woodenly. "Nice to meet you, Mina. You're here to see my husband, the Collector." She jerks her head toward the other end of the hall, and her pretty blond hair bounces like something from a shampoo commercial.

_Shampoo fairies, tinkle-tinkle-tinkle…_

What? Where do you _get_ this shit?

_Fanfiction?_

Jesus. Whatever. Next you'll be telling me there's an alternate dimension where I marry the world's most eligible bachelor and I run the Avengers.

_Wow. Not gonna touch that one._

The door shuts behind Mina, so she follows Dorky Dory toward the light at the other end of the hallway.

_Traaaaain!_

Ess-tee-eff-you.

The chamber at the end is huge and filled with dancing sunbeams and _junk_. Millions of little bits and pieces. Bottles of liquids and jars of marbles. Gum wrappers, fish hooks, pieces of string. Plastic straws (the bendy kind) and empty milk jugs.

"So what does he collect?"

In the middle of the room, right under the brightest sunlight, a scrawny guy is perched on a ladder. He's fiddling with a huge bundle of assorted light bulbs hanging from the ceiling like mismatched grapes. "Know what kipple is?" he asks.

Mina looks around. "This is pretty much the definition."

"Yeah."

"Does it really breed in dusty corners?"

"Oh, yes," says the skinny guy. "N-not—not _here_." He gesticulates. "No. Not here. Everywhere—almost everywhere—else. It's, it—there's a matter of quantum resonant similarities and the Fidelis Effect, which all has to do with a bunch of very intriguing probabilities dealing with entanglement and—"

"Off-topic, honey," says Dory.

"Oh. Oh, yeah," the guy says, bonking himself on the head. He hops down from the ladder and holds out a hand to shake. "William Maximoff. CT…203, I think? I haven't looked lately. You, if the paperwork is right, you're Mina Wilson FT101-Omega. Do me a quick, quick favor, and just—" He throws something at her, so she catches it.

_Oh, look, an empty snowglobe._

"Just what I always wanted?" Mina tries, slanting a skeptical look at the Collector.

He twiddles his fingers in a wheel-turning motion. "Just—j-just _fiddle_ with it. Go on."

Sure. Why the fuck not. It's been that kind of day.

Mina tosses the thing between her hands for a little bit without really paying attention.

"Try…closing your eyes, maybe?" suggests the Collector.

Shrugging, she does. The little sphere feels like it's getting warmer. She's bored already…

Automatic motions. Like drumming fingers against a desk, like clicking a pen, like taking apart a Glock and putting it back together. Like playing with a knife.

It beeps at her so suddenly that she jumps back and drops it. It makes a beautiful ringing noise when it hits the ground.

_~Ow. Ident verified. Hello, Mina, my name's Eight-ball.~_

"What. The. _Fuck_," Mina says.

On the floor, the thing's twinkling in the sun, lighting up blue and white and green like the reflection of Christmas lights.

"Good, good, good," says the Collector. "That's all your problem now, Keeper 192. Just a small matter of barter… You have a bag of candy with you—I need it."

Mina puts a protective hand over the pouch of her utility belt where said candy is hiding. "My jumbo konpeito? You know how hard it is to get these things outside Japan?"

"Yes, actually, I really, really do, but, but I _need_ them. Or, well, someone. Someone else _not_ me will need them, possibly something like a hundred years ago, so I have to have them here, I've got just the place for them, they'll be completely safe—"

"What the hell are jumbo konpeito good for, besides eating?" Mina demands.

"Ah—um—possibly projectile warfare? I don't really know, that's not my job, I just know that they belong on the table with the other sizes."

_~You should listen to him, Mina.~_

"Hey, you pipe down," she snaps at the little globe. "I've already got an annoying voice in my head, so you'll have to go find a different job."

_~Just trust me on this, okay? I can see the futures.~_

"You mean future?"

_~No, more than one. I'm _very_ handy to have around, Mina.~_

She considers that. "Can you tell me what the Lotto numbers are gonna be?"

_~In some world. With 85.3% certainty. Little numbered ping pong balls are subject to a lot of random particle interaction, you know. It's a lot easier to tell you exactly where every pigeon on Manhattan will shit within a given twenty-minute period, or whether the guy walking down the sidewalk in front of you is about to get hit by a bus.~_

Dory makes a (very pretty) horrified face. Will half-nods in agreement (or concession).

Mina grins. "_Cool beans_," she says, and picks up the glass ball.

_That's right, kids, we can see the future._

Deadpool. _Wins._

**.End.**


End file.
